Boeing unit tries to speed pilot training to fill high demand

As The Boeing Co. and Airbus sell more planes than ever, many of those planes are headed to parts of the world where airlines are desperate for pilots.
With such demand, Alteon is testing a program that can cut training time in half. Students will spend much more time in ground-based simulators and far less time actually flying a plane — and that has critics worried.
Training pilots to fly commercial jetliners is difficult, expensive and time-consuming.
It can take as long as three years to train someone who has never flown any kind of plane to fly commercial jets as first officer. So the industry is closely watching what is happening at Alteon’s flight training school in Brisbane, Australia.
The framework for the new program, known as the Multi-Crew Pilots License, or MPL, was established last year by the International Civil Aviation Organization, an agency of the United Nations.
Alteon’s Carbary said Boeing worked with regulators and customers to “enhance” what ICAO proposed. The aim is to teach students from the beginning the skills they need to fly in a multicrew jetliner. Instead of accumulating a couple of hundred or more hours flying in a small, single-engine plane, the Brisbane students will spend a lot of their training in a Boeing 737-800 simulator. They will rotate their time in the simulator as captain, first officer and as an observer.
In other words, they learn to be a crew member flying a full-motion simulator that is as realistic as the cockpit of a 737, rather than accumulating flight time in a single-engine Cessna 152.
In the U.S., the Federal Aviation Administration requires 250 flight hours to attain a commercial license. Most first officers would have many more hours than that.
The MPL program established by ICAO requires students to receive 70 hours of actual flight time, 10 hours of which must be solo.
But Alteon has gone beyond what ICAO requires, according to Marsha Bell, marketing director for Alteon who was previously vice president of Alteon’s first officer programs.
Alteon’s cadets will spend at least 83 hours in a single-engine Diamond 40 plane. They will also spend 117 hours in simulators, first in a Diamond 40 simulator and then in the Boeing 737-800 simulator.
The Alteon cadets each will be required to complete 33 missions in the Boeing simulator as captain, 33 missions as first officer and 33 missions as the observer. Each training mission will last about two hours.
30/04/07 James Wallace/Seattle Post Intelligencer, US